The Battleship Island (Gun-ham-do) [Sub: Eng]

Technically accomplished, narratively impoverished.

While Battleship Island is sometimes unpleasant to watch, it is a consistently involving, atypically thoughtful crowd-pleaser.

Though Mr. Ryoo's taste for heightened theatricality threatens his story's credibility at times, there is no denying his skill with a large-scale action set piece.

It's when the various threads converge that the mechanical nature of the plotting and the thinness of the characterizations are thrown into sharpest relief.

... I enjoyed the touching performance of the father-daughter duo, and Battleship Island will undoubtedly attract hordes of Song fans who want to see their idol don a military uniform again after Descendants Of The Sun.

There is more than one way to approach wartime movies, as the recent box-office successes of Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk and Ryoo Seung Wan's The Battleship Island prove.

Though Ryoo excels at both action narrative and harrowing history, the combination of the two feels strained.

It's a pity that Ryoo insists on prioritising violence, melodrama and shameless jingoism to the point of exploitation, wringing this real-life tragedy for every tear - and dollar - he can.

That BATTLESHIP ISLAND is heartfelt piece of patriotic fanservice doesn't keep the film from being an undisciplined, scattered, overlong mess, and the worst movie Director Ryoo Seung-wan has made.

Although its plot could have been trimmed and more clearly focused, this rousing wartime saga is truly epic, in every sense of the word.

While there's no doubting its huge ambitions, The Battleship Island turns out to be a disappointing misfire.